Intimate partner violence against women is a complex, enormously prevalent crime with devastating effects on women’s safety, health, and well being. With one out of three women worldwide experiencing this violence, its magnitude presents complex challenges to justice systems when survivors of violence seek to formally prosecute perpetrators. Further exacerbating this challenge are the varying individual, family, and community ideas about whether and how such violence – considered a private family matter in many cultural and social contexts – should be made public at all, let alone prosecuted.

Feminist activists insist on a core ethical standard that women survivors of intimate partner violence determine their own course of action in response to violence. But significant obstacles exist in every direction survivors of intimate partner violence may turn.

Both anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that, in the face of these obstacles, a significant proportion of women survivors of intimate partner violence choose community-based alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms to help address the violence they are facing. Research finds that as many as 80 percent of disputes made public in the Global South are addressed through the informal justice system.

This report examines how well ADR mechanisms have addressed violence for women around the world by examining the following:

What do ADR responses to intimate partner violence look like, particularly in the Global South?

To what extent do these approaches prioritize the voice and agency of women survivors of intimate partner violence?

What examples exist of ADR approaches that better prioritize the voice and agency of women survivors of intimate partner violence?

The digital revolution is transforming how human beings live, work, and relate to each another. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have vast potential to communicate, gain access to information and services, and catalyse collective action for social justice. But there is also the risk this revolution will fail to challenge stark inequalities in terms of who benefits and whose voice is heard. And technologies can be used by those who seek to challenge rights as well as realise them.

Join at 5 for a 5.30 start for the launch event of the new issue of Gender & Development which focuses on Information Communication Technologies from the perspective of women’s rights and gender justice.

Introduced by Dr. Caroline Sweetman, editor of Gender & Development, the panel will be chaired by Dr. Awino Okech from the Centre of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Panelists include Dr. Ronda Zelezny-Green whose article in the journal focuses on the rights on Kenyan girls in the digital age and informal education, Shannon Philip who writes on Youth and ICTs in a ‘new’ India and co-editor Amy O’Donnell who is a specialist on digital technologies at Oxfam and Board member of anti-harassment charity Hollaback!

This edition of Wumen Bagung explores four key themes, each focused on how communication outcomes are influenced by the role of the community, and whether it is passive or active participant. The first theme brings together analyses from across Asia of different ways of communicating to local communities starting with a review of how water, hygiene and sanitation services are communicated in Cambodia, fresh approaches to communication underway in Myanmar by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the use of cable television in local Philippine communities.

The second theme – which details outside approaches to communication for development (C4D) – opens with Robert Boughen’s challenge for us to rethink Chinese media development investments, not from a neoliberal development perspective, rather through acknowledging that Chinese media assistance in Africa ‘has an active function in a cohesive model of the ‘development economy’. Edwar Hanna and Jackie Davies of C4D Network consider the effects of urbanisation on communication for development, while Sina Øversveen critically examines the Freedom of the Press Index.

The third theme focuses on the lessons to be learned from local communities by directly involving them in C4D. In ‘The Space Between’, Donna Griffin takes us on a journey of learning the Aboriginal way of understanding the world, while Winifredo Dagli reviews the learning development training offered by the University of Philippines Los Banos. Kylie Smith and Melissa Fan close this theme with an examination of C4D in the age of feminism.

The final theme provides examples of the community as leaders in communication and looks at how video is actively being used to interrogate local development challenges in India, followed by an analysis of public art as a critical tool in democratic communication.

Through a feminist lens that brings together economic justice and gender justice concerns, this paper traces the key elements of the right to access, right to knowledge and right to development in the network society context. It highlights how this three-pronged approach to scoping the “right to communicate” can serve as a guiding framework for feminist analysis and action at the intersections of gender, digital technologies and development.

The paper outlines strategic directions for feminist advocacy in relation to information and communications technologies (ICTs), at different scales and spaces – global, national and local.

Between January and November 2017, APC carried out a mapping study of the research in gender and digital technology taking place in or concerning middle and low-income countries in the last decade (2006-2017). The study focuses on information and communications technologies and the internet in particular but broadly encompasses digital technology and its impact on gender.

This publication is the final output of that research project. The objective is to map knowledge production in the field of gender and digital technology and support gender inclusion in the IDRC Networked Economies programme.